[IP] One Internet provider's view of FBI's CALEA wiretap push

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 05:56 PM 4/22/04 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
>On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>
>> At 12:09 PM 4/22/04 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>> >
>> >Are you truly expecting a worldwide ban on encryption? How do you
prove
>> >somebody is using encryption on a steganographic channel?
>>
>> Torture, of the sender, receiver, or their families, has worked
pretty
>> well.
>> If you're good you don't even leave marks.
>
>However, it's not entirely reliable. At some point, the suspect tells
you
>what you want to hear, whether or not it is the truth, just so you
leave
>him alone. It can even happen that the suspect convinces himself that
what
>he really did what he was supposed to do.

Interrogators check out each confession.  First ones won't work, bogus
keys.  Just noise.  Second confession reveals pork recipes hidden in
landscape
pictures.  Beneath that layer of filesystem is stego'd some
porn.  Beneath that, homosexual porn.    But your interrogators
want the address book stego'd beneath that.  They know that these
are stego distraction levels, uninteresting to them.  You'll give it to
them eventually.  If you give them a believable but fake one,
it will damage innocents or true members of your association.

>This brings another ofren underestimated problem into the area of
>cryptosystem design, the "rubberhose resistance".

My comments were written with that in mind.  I'm familiar with
filesystems
(etc) with layers of deniable stego.

I wonder how quickly one could incinerate a memory card in the field
with high success rate?   Destroy the data and the passphrases don't
help.